I did some searching and haven’t found an actual answer to this yet; so here I am.
Problem:
Let’s say you have a cube, and it has a material named CUBEA_Material in Maya. I also have a material named CUBEA_Material inside UE4. I would expect that on import, the material would be seen as already existing and simply hook it up to the mesh, but this isn’t the case. It just creates a new CUBEA_Material in the same directory as the mesh. I understand I can manually hook up the material via simply applying it or setting it as the default material inside UE4, but on large projects I can see this being extremely time consuming. It is extremely useful for importing assets that share the same material, without having to go in and manually hook every material by hand.
I work with Unity at work on a decent sized team (70+) and we had a very serious issue with Unity creating duplicate materials from imported assets. It may not seem like a large issue, and I can’t really go into detail but let me just say it has caused serious problems.
As of yet I haven’t found any way of importing an asset and having Unreal recognize the material as existing in the project already and simply applying it. Hopefully it’s something simply that I’ve missed.